Outsourcing: How to find help for your business

In a previous post, I’ve suggested you find people to help you with tasks that don’t fall within your strong skills. You might note that nobody can do your job as well as you can. Nobody can love your business as much as you do. Nobody can understand your business to the same degree.

That’s probably true. If you decide to hire someone to help you with some of your work, you might need to spend MORE time upfront training that person (but I don’t have the time).

In the Related Articles Section I have included an article titled The 6th Realization of Rich People — R.O.T.I. — Return on Time Investment. Following is an excerpt from that article …

A professor in one of my business classes taught me that “when trying to decide whether to delegate something to someone else or to do something yourself you should use the 30 to 1 rule.”

That is, that if it was a daily task that took a skilled person like yourself five minute to complete, you should plan to spend at least 150 minutes (5 minutes multiplied by 30) instructing the subordinate on how to complete the same task.

Now the 150 minutes shouldn’t all be done at one time and could be spread over a few months as you help the subordinate master the task.”

He then explained the math behind it.

“If a task were to take you personally 5 minutes a day for 250 days in a working year then that means you would spend 1250 minutes per year on that task.

Rather than doing that however, if you decided to spend 150 minutes training someone to do that 5-minute task and they instead did that task for you then that would give you an annual savings of 1100 minutes per year.”

Think about it just for a minute …

If you spent some time, up front, training someone to do a task for you, what would you do with the extra time that you found?

If that sounds like a good idea, then you need to figure out how to find someone that can offer you some aid (there’s always a catch). It’s actually not that hard. The first place to look for service providers is in your own networks. Ask other business owners if they can recommend someone. If that doesn’t net any results, ask your Facebook friends or ask around at church or other places you frequent. Often someone you know will know a service provider. Getting a personal recommendation is your best option.

There will be times you won’t be able to find a personal recommendation. Some tips for those times are to search on LinkedIn or Google.